¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost : ¥2,100,000)

Fiscal Year 1999 : ¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost : ¥2,100,000)

Keywords

Children / Activation of Children / Nature school / Staying in mountain villages as a student / Small-scale schools with a special permit for admitting students across the school district / Recuperation schools / Schools for physically handicapped or mentally retarded children / Long-term natural experience

Research Abstract

Environments surrounding children have changed considerably in recent years due to rapid urbanization, emergence of new information technology and resultant turnover in industrial structure, weakening of solidarity in local communities, the trend towards the nuclear family and fewer children among others. Consequently, our society is faced with difficulties in maintaining children's contact with nature, human interactions the acquistion of appropriate habit of living, and sound development of the body which are all essential for building their characters. To overcome these difficulties, it seems urgent to establish a system of providing children with long-term natural experience together with experience of corporate living, especially one acquired through living in natural areas.This research study is a multilateral attempt to test this hypothesis through examining typical programs available today for long-term natural experience in three school settings : mountain-village schools, sma
… Morell-scale schools in town and recuperation schools. Programs and their evaluation by the facility managers were thus investigated by means of a set of questionnaire surveys addressed to schools. Another set of questionnaire surveys addressed to school children were administered to reveal their experiences and evaluation.The understanding of differential characteristics of the three settings was conductive to developing a proposal for establishing the Model Nature School System. Overall evaluation was relatively high in the mountain-village and recuperation school settings and relatively low in the small-scale setting. The mountain-village school setting represented a model of active local exchanges ; the recuperation school setting represented a model of self-contained community consisting of a dormitory and a school. School children evaluated their natural exposure most important of all experiences. Also important were corporate experiences in the mountain-village setting, corporate and living experiences in the small- scale school setting, and health improvement and living experiences in the recuperation school setting. Factors affecting school children's experiences include total floor areas of facilities and teaching styles. In terms of environmental factors, the importance of river use, the art and cultural tradition of the locality, and outdoor activity was confirmed. Less